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Cynthia Chase

Website(s)

Overview

Cynthia Chase teaches courses in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature on European Romanticism, critical theory, autobiography, and poetry. She is the author of Decomposing Figures: Rhetorical Readings in the Romantic Tradition and the editor of Longmans Critical Readers Romanticism, and has published many articles on Romanticism and critical theory, especially psychoanalysis and deconstruction.

Current research projects: How do works of literature written in the Romantic period survive for today’s public? I am writing about how this happens via critical interpretation and via other kinds of works of art. I am also exploring the history of interpretations of the French Revolution, reflected in such different areas as present-day discussions of human rights and directors’ and performers’ decisions about how to stage a play or an opera representing the Terror. My current research and teaching investigates conflicts in the ways Wordsworth and Keats are read and the difficulties of framing or performing a writer’s life and work.

Research Focus

Romanticism

Critical Theory

Wordworth

Poetry

Autobiography

Literature and Music

Translation

Cynthia Chase teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature. She focuses on literature of the Romantic period and on nineteenth and twentieth century writing about the survival of poetry and the concept of human rights. Her recent teaching and research explore the formal and political issues involved in representing a writer’s life and work, especially those of women or poets. She is currently investigating how poetry and novels resurface as works of music or theater.

Research Focus

English and European literature of the Romantic period and the nineteenth century